Setting the Standard: Inside the Program Driving Excellence in Tech Hiring

At Delivery Hero, building a world-class technology ecosystem requires consistency and a commitment to long-term quality. At the core of this philosophy is the Bar Raiser Program, a dedicated community of experienced interviewers whose mission is to ensure every new team member elevates the collective standard of the organization.

The Delivery Hero tech community gathered for the Bar Raiser Program Recognition event to celebrate the impact of this initiative, recognize outstanding contributors, and dive into an open conversation with Chief Technology Officer, Benjamin Mann.

What is a Bar Raiser?

A Bar Raiser is a specially selected, highly experienced interviewer who has consistently demonstrated exceptional interviewing acumen. Holding the Bar Raiser title is not solely about seniority; it represents the responsibility of upholding hiring standards across all engineering domains.

While role-specific interviews evaluate functional competence, Bar Raiser interviews focus deliberately on the qualities that are harder to teach:

• Growth potential: Assessing curiosity, adaptability, and how far a candidate can develop over time.
• Pragmatic problem-solving: Looking at how engineers navigate trade-offs, edge cases, and architectural constraints.
• Collaboration and long-term impact: Evaluating cultural alignment, humility, communication, and the ability to elevate surrounding peers.

Bar Raisers operate as objective, independent evaluators who are not part of the hiring team and are not incentivized simply to close the hire. Their presence ensures hiring teams avoid the trap of prioritizing short-term speed over long-term quality, keeping Delivery Hero’s recruitment process rigorous, inclusive, and forward-looking.

In Conversation with CTO, Ben Mann

During the session, Ben reflected on the program's vital contribution to Delivery Hero's position as a global tech company. He noted that Delivery Hero’s ability to build complex, scalable platforms across multiple continents is a byproduct of never compromising on engineering talent.

To help interviewers sharpen their assessments, he shared key mental models for candidate evaluation:

"How confident from 1 to 10 are you that this person would be in the top 25% of your team? If 8 and above, consider hiring."

He emphasized that hesitation doesn't automatically mean an immediate rejection, but it requires interviewers to critically unpack why they feel uncertain.

Identifying Signal vs. Noise

When assessing candidates, the team highlighted essential indicators:

• Hands-On Experience vs. Theory: A red flag is when candidates speak in high-level generalities without articulating the specifics. Candidates should be able to discuss concrete engineering challenges they have worked on or solved with depth and ownership. Hypothetical responses suggest the candidate has read about the solution rather than actually lived it.
• Accountability When Things Go Wrong: A favorite question: "Tell me about a decision in your career that didn’t go to plan and how you dealt with it." Candidates who claim nothing has ever gone wrong or deflect blame onto external teams signal a lack of maturity. At Delivery Hero's pace, mistakes are inevitable, making a spotless record a sign of luck rather than proven ability. High-caliber engineers take accountability, unpack the failure, and implement lasting solutions.
• Demonstrating Genuine Enthusiasm: At Delivery Hero, we love it when candidates talk with visible pride and detail about side projects, systems built from scratch, or challenges they poured effort into solving. Technical mentors can coach tools, but innate drive cannot be taught.

Engineering in the Age of AI

The team discussed how the shift from hyper-growth to sustainable maturity, coupled with the rapid rise of AI alters the hiring equation. Ai will radically redefine what great engineering looks like:

• Hire Great Engineers, Not Single-Tool Specialists: Interviewers should not hunt narrowly for an isolated "AI engineer" or a "Java-only expert." The goal is to hire well-rounded engineers who possess wide domain knowledge, and learn and adapt quickly.
• Beyond Prompting: Modern AI developer tooling quickly exposes candidates who lack foundational understanding. Delivery Hero looks for candidates who have a solid mental model of what occurs behind the scenes, demonstrate baseline productivity with new tooling, and proactively optimize their workflows without blindly accepting generated output.

Following the keynote, attendees broke into specialized working groups to tackle practical challenges, ranging from calibrating the role of AI in technical loops to formalizing Bar Raiser involvement in performance calibration cycles.

Ben closed with a direct charge to Delivery Hero’s engineering community: if anyone spots an inefficiency or holds an idea that can elevate hiring practices, step forward and champion it.  Excellence in hiring is not a static policy handed down from leadership, it is an active discipline owned and continuously refined by the engineers building the future of the platform every day. 

Sound like a team you'd thrive in? We’re always looking for curious builders who want to raise the standard with us. Take a look at what we’re hiring for right now.